Limitations of Perceptual Reality

..The Limitations of Perceptual Reality

....Part 1: Mind, Memory and Moose
....By Timothy W. Shire

Sleep
Deprivation Once in June of 1966 North of Kenosee Lake at about 3:30 AM I met a Massey Harris 27 combine coming down the middle of highway number nine about four feet above the pavement. I had been working day and night for several days finishing up June exams and moving back from Bengough for my summer job at the Lake. The combine was complete and I could clearly see it in my head lights. A decision had to be made. Since combines are not normally seen on the highway during June and I did not recall having ever seen one moving along while not making contact with the ground it was reasonable and my considered decision that what I was seeing was not at all real, at least in a physical substantive way. What I saw was real enough but believing that it was not possible, I held my course a drove through what was, or was not, there. By the way, don’t try this. I was young and stupid and should not have taken my life so lightly for indeed something could have been there and I would not be telling you about it now.

during REM ...our brain’s various components sort and classify The experience I have just recounted is a description of a hallucination, a dream that occurs while in a conscious state. Each conscious period of our lives is held in short term memory then as we sleep the experiences and all the sensory details that go with those experiences are transformed, or at least some of them, are moved from the temporary day to day memory, to longer term memory which we suspect is chemical with in our brains. If however, you do not sleep, and in my case this was in the rush that ends the school year, but it can happen to people if they take medication that causes extra ordinary deep sleep, the process we refer to as dreaming, does not take place, and this memory transition is not performed. During your sleep you move through various stages of sleep, the deep sleep with much of the brain’s activity shut down is the umbra and some scientists describe our dream sequences as the pilot light that keeps us alive, for after a period of deep umbra sleep we move to a lighter sleep at which time various sections of the brain return to a much high level of function and we actually track the things we are seeing in our brain with our eyes and thus this type of sleep is referred to as REM sleep, or rapid eye movement. It is during REM sleep that our brain’s various components sort and classify and begin the processing of experience that is transferred to memory that will last our lives.

Some where between forty-eight and seventy-two hours seems to be our capacity But as mentioned, if REM sleep is prevented, either by being awake or taking medication or some chemical that disrupts the sleep pattern, then your temporary, short term memory is asked to keep the past days activities in temporary storage for another day. Some where between forty-eight and seventy-two hours seems to be our capacity and it varies according to the kind of activities you have had, some things and some experience consume far more memory and so the actual amount is not fixed. However, when the limit of what short term memory available is being reached the brain reacts in a very predictable manner. It is annoyed and will actually requisition other parts of the brain to handle the duties of short term memory, which of course reduces the person’s functionality. The person will often exhibit shortness of temper, seem easily upset and will have a lot of trouble concentrating because his or her brain’s functionality is being reduced steadily. There is a point where the system determines that there is no other systems to shut down and use that brain function for memory, at this point the person’s periphery vision will have been knocked out, tthe person's hearing will be functional but they may have trouble understanding the sounds he or she hears and the ability to do higher functions like math or do things that require mathematical like activities, particularly visual things, will be hampered considerably. At any time that person can experience a waking dream. (Pushing an individual to continued wakefulness beyond seventy-two hours can produce permanent brain damage which would not be unlike the sort of damage a person experiences from injury where the personality might even seem different)

It is real to the person experiencing the event The brain attempts to move some of the stored data and as it does so images are moved from the temporary short term storage to the visual presentation system and hence on its way to long term memory. What a person sees in this state, is it real? The answer is both yes and no. It is real to the person experiencing the event and it is not real in the physical world outside the individual’s brain.

Because we often expect, through experience, certain things in an image, we will often add them, even if they are not there This same question can of course be posed to the waking person who is not experiencing a hallucination. Is what they see real? The answer is both yes and no. What you see is not necessarily an image of the physical world but how the image of that world is presented to you through your vision system and what you do with that image in your brain. Because we often expect, through experience, certain things in an image, we will often add them, even if they are not there, because to save time and effort the brain uses cached or former similar images, to keep the level of input at a manageable level. Also, the nature of human eyes is such that they have a fixed scan rate and retain images from one scan to the next, this is referred to as retina retention, but it really works well. In a movie theatre we see flashing lights at 24 lighted images and 24 black ones a second. Our brain neatly knits the lighted images together and we see motion, which is not there at all. Television does the same thing only at 30 frames a second with 30 blanks in between. In a room lighted by fluorescent lights the room is in total darkness sixty times a second yet we can’t see that but think the room is in fact lit continuously.

our “real” world is within the confines of our mind. In any event, no matter if it is some thing you see, taste, smell or hearm the sensory input must be accompanied by the brain recognising the event and dealing with it. Everything you do or experience is a mental event, we like to describe things in terms of physical reality but our “real” world is within the confines of our mind. So much that happens is far beyond our capabilities to sense or even process if sensation takes place so in effect we do a lot of sampling and our brain constructs what we think from the samples of reality it is able to recognise and understand.

Without that image in my brain’s visual vocabulary I could not identify what I saw Seven thousand feet over a mountain lake in a dished out top of a mountain I saw whales swimming in the crystal clear water. This was no hallucination, the evidence was there, three large dark colour animals were moving through the water at a good speed and their bodies were making undulating up and down motions that we associate with whales. I was not alone in the plane and my two observers also saw my whales and all of us were unable to explain the phenomena. It was several weeks later when Alex Mercier, an experienced hunter, trapper and prospector who had spent much of his life in aircraft and on the ground in the Yukon and as we flew over another similar pond I spotted one of my whales. Alex was a kind man and I am thankful for that, because the whales I had seen were indeed the only thing my mind could come up with, for I had never seen a black bear swimming. Without that image in my brain’s visual vocabulary I could not identify what I saw as bears. Alex also showed me a moose. Now I had over flown locations with trees and swamp before but did not know what features from a thousand feet above the surface to look for to recognise a shape on the ground as a moose.

experience teaches you more and more You only can see what you know and through your life, experience teaches you more and more, but that does not mean that things do not exist because you do not recognise them, any more then black bears are whales, because you have never seen a swimming black bear.

Part II Next week we take this one step further, to consider other black holes of the alternative realities people report having seen such as ghosts, fairies, angels, aliens and various representations of the creator and deities.

..The Limitations of Perceptual Reality ....Part 1: Mind, Memory and Moose ....By Timothy W. Shire

Sleep Deprivation	Once in June of 1966 North of Kenosee Lake at about 3:30 AM I met a Massey Harris 27 combine coming down the middle of highway number nine about four feet above the pavement. I had been working day and night for several days finishing up June exams and moving back from Bengough for my summer job at the Lake. The combine was complete and I could clearly see it in my head lights. A decision had to be made. Since combines are not normally seen on the highway during June and I did not recall having ever seen one moving along while not making contact with the ground it was reasonable and my considered decision that what I was seeing was not at all real, at least in a physical substantive way. What I saw was real enough but believing that it was not possible, I held my course a drove through what was, or was not, there. By the way, don’t try this. I was young and stupid and should not have taken my life so lightly for indeed something could have been there and I would not be telling you about it now.

during REM ...our brain’s various components sort and classify	The experience I have just recounted is a description of a hallucination, a dream that occurs while in a conscious state. Each conscious period of our lives is held in short term memory then as we sleep the experiences and all the sensory details that go with those experiences are transformed, or at least some of them, are moved from the temporary day to day memory, to longer term memory which we suspect is chemical with in our brains. If however, you do not sleep, and in my case this was in the rush that ends the school year, but it can happen to people if they take medication that causes extra ordinary deep sleep, the process we refer to as dreaming, does not take place, and this memory transition is not performed. During your sleep you move through various stages of sleep, the deep sleep with much of the brain’s activity shut down is the umbra and some scientists describe our dream sequences as the pilot light that keeps us alive, for after a period of deep umbra sleep we move to a lighter sleep at which time various sections of the brain return to a much high level of function and we actually track the things we are seeing in our brain with our eyes and thus this type of sleep is referred to as REM sleep, or rapid eye movement. It is during REM sleep that our brain’s various components sort and classify and begin the processing of experience that is transferred to memory that will last our lives.

Some where between forty-eight and seventy-two hours seems to be our capacity	But as mentioned, if REM sleep is prevented, either by being awake or taking medication or some chemical that disrupts the sleep pattern, then your temporary, short term memory is asked to keep the past days activities in temporary storage for another day. Some where between forty-eight and seventy-two hours seems to be our capacity and it varies according to the kind of activities you have had, some things and some experience consume far more memory and so the actual amount is not fixed. However, when the limit of what short term memory available is being reached the brain reacts in a very predictable manner. It is annoyed and will actually requisition other parts of the brain to handle the duties of short term memory, which of course reduces the person’s functionality. The person will often exhibit shortness of temper, seem easily upset and will have a lot of trouble concentrating because his or her brain’s functionality is being reduced steadily. There is a point where the system determines that there is no other systems to shut down and use that brain function for memory, at this point the person’s periphery vision will have been knocked out, tthe person's hearing will be functional but they may have trouble understanding the sounds he or she hears and the ability to do higher functions like math or do things that require mathematical like activities, particularly visual things, will be hampered considerably. At any time that person can experience a waking dream. (Pushing an individual to continued wakefulness beyond seventy-two hours can produce permanent brain damage which would not be unlike the sort of damage a person experiences from injury where the personality might even seem different)

It is real to the person experiencing the event	The brain attempts to move some of the stored data and as it does so images are moved from the temporary short term storage to the visual presentation system and hence on its way to long term memory. What a person sees in this state, is it real? The answer is both yes and no. It is real to the person experiencing the event and it is not real in the physical world outside the individual’s brain.

Because we often expect, through experience, certain things in an image, we will often add them, even if they are not there	This same question can of course be posed to the waking person who is not experiencing a hallucination. Is what they see real? The answer is both yes and no. What you see is not necessarily an image of the physical world but how the image of that world is presented to you through your vision system and what you do with that image in your brain. Because we often expect, through experience, certain things in an image, we will often add them, even if they are not there, because to save time and effort the brain uses cached or former similar images, to keep the level of input at a manageable level. Also, the nature of human eyes is such that they have a fixed scan rate and retain images from one scan to the next, this is referred to as retina retention, but it really works well. In a movie theatre we see flashing lights at 24 lighted images and 24 black ones a second. Our brain neatly knits the lighted images together and we see motion, which is not there at all. Television does the same thing only at 30 frames a second with 30 blanks in between. In a room lighted by fluorescent lights the room is in total darkness sixty times a second yet we can’t see that but think the room is in fact lit continuously.

our “real” world is within the confines of our mind.	In any event, no matter if it is some thing you see, taste, smell or hearm the sensory input must be accompanied by the brain recognising the event and dealing with it. Everything you do or experience is a mental event, we like to describe things in terms of physical reality but our “real” world is within the confines of our mind. So much that happens is far beyond our capabilities to sense or even process if sensation takes place so in effect we do a lot of sampling and our brain constructs what we think from the samples of reality it is able to recognise and understand.

Without that image in my brain’s visual vocabulary I could not identify what I saw	Seven thousand feet over a mountain lake in a dished out top of a mountain I saw whales swimming in the crystal clear water. This was no hallucination, the evidence was there, three large dark colour animals were moving through the water at a good speed and their bodies were making undulating up and down motions that we associate with whales. I was not alone in the plane and my two observers also saw my whales and all of us were unable to explain the phenomena. It was several weeks later when Alex Mercier, an experienced hunter, trapper and prospector who had spent much of his life in aircraft and on the ground in the Yukon and as we flew over another similar pond I spotted one of my whales. Alex was a kind man and I am thankful for that, because the whales I had seen were indeed the only thing my mind could come up with, for I had never seen a black bear swimming. Without that image in my brain’s visual vocabulary I could not identify what I saw as bears. Alex also showed me a moose. Now I had over flown locations with trees and swamp before but did not know what features from a thousand feet above the surface to look for to recognise a shape on the ground as a moose.

experience teaches you more and more	You only can see what you know and through your life, experience teaches you more and more, but that does not mean that things do not exist because you do not recognise them, any more then black bears are whales, because you have never seen a swimming black bear.

Part II	Next week we take this one step further, to consider other black holes of the alternative realities people report having seen such as ghosts, fairies, angels, aliens and various representations of the creator and deities.

..The Limitations of Perceptual Reality

....Part 1: Mind, Memory and Moose ....By Timothy W. Shire

....Part 1: Mind, Memory and Moose
....By Timothy W. Shire